Kathryn Harrison and Joan Didion both have extraordinary essays.
Start with the collected tweets of Donald Trump. A few months immersion in that oeuvre should free you up. Something like a life-threatening bout of gastric distress. The workings of a genius very smart mind...
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So will you get a book contract to compile these great writers’ words and take home the money yourself?
A good choice would be Revelations: Diaries of Women, an anthology of diary excerpts by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, published all the way back in the seventies but still very readable. Many are from writers, including Anais Nin, Louisa May Alcott, and George Eliot, and that will provide a good start on seeking out the writing of those she enjoys.
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For memoir, you can't do better than LAST STANDS: Notes from Memory. Lots of people read it multiple times. It's a great example of memoir that does not get caught in navel gazing.
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Thanks, Ms. Lamy. That was interesting.
Something I read in Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope has long stuck with me. And yes! he is talking about letter writing, not diary keeping. But his thoughts are applicable to both.
Letters, Dr. Johnson observes, are always thought candid revelations of a man's heart. (Or, of course, a woman"s). Here, he tells us, we seem to be laying aside artifice--all pretense--all subterfuge. We are showing the recipient WHO we are--and WHAT we are.
In your dreams! he goes on to say. "Most of us have hearts we dare not look into ourselves--and what we conceal from ourselves we do not willingly show another."
Bingo. You are on the money, Ms. Lamy, when you speak of "posterity looking over the diarist's shoulder." Or really anyone looking over that shoulder. Even the diarist herself--looking (as it were) over her own shoulder.
But I say this--then I recall the words from Evelyn Waugh's diary. A diary (you remember) published in the 1980's-- after NO END of deletions and expurgations.
"How poorly" he exclaims after one clumsy, complicated sentence--"how poorly I write when I have no one to order my thoughts for."
Does that prove my point, Ms. Lamy? Or your point? Or anyone's point? Is there a sense in which WHENEVER we take pen in hand. . . .
. . .we are playing as it were to an invisible audience?
An audience of one.
Us.
You tell me.
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